Watercolor's Quiet Revolution: From Dürer's Hare to Turner's Skies

In 1502, Albrecht Dürer painted a young hare on a sheet of paper about 25 by 22 centimeters. He used watercolor and bodycolor, the opaque version of the same paint, to build the animal fur by fur.¹

More than five hundred years later, the sheet is still in Vienna, at the Albertina. Its precision showed that water and pigment on paper could rival oil on panel.

Watercolor is paint made of fine pigment suspended in a water-soluble binder, usually gum with a little glucose or glycerine.² Diluted with water, it goes on in thin, see-through layers called washes.

No one pushed watercolor further than J. M. W. Turner. He filled sketchbooks with it, and used it for finished pictures such as The Blue Rigi, Sunrise (1842), now at Tate.^{2, 4}

When he died in 1851, he left the nation a staggering body of work: around 300 oil paintings and many thousands of sketches and watercolors, including about 300 sketchbooks.⁴ Much of it shows the same obsession: light dissolving water, mist and stone.

By the end of the century, American painters had made watercolor their own. Winslow Homer (1836–1910) used it on trips south, catching the glare of the tropics in a few loose washes. John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) used it for freer, sunlit work, such as this view of the Alpine village of Abriès.^{5, 6}

A few words you will meet in every museum label and every watercolor class.

Wash. A thin, even layer of diluted paint laid over an area, often a whole sky in a single stroke.

Glaze. A transparent layer laid over a dry one. Colors mix in the eye, like sheets of tinted glass.

Wet-on-wet. Paint dropped onto wet paper, where it spreads and blooms. Perfect for clouds, mist and water.

Reserve. An area of paper left untouched on purpose. In watercolor, the whitest white is the paper itself.²

Bodycolor. Watercolor made opaque with white, today usually called gouache. Dürer combined it with watercolor in his hare.¹

Let it breathe. Watercolor is about air and light. Give it a wall with space around it, in a bright room.

Keep the palette soft. White or warm-white walls, pale wood and linen let the washes stay luminous.

Think in pairs. Two watercolor-style pieces side by side, a lake and a bird, a flower and a coastline, read like pages from the same sketchbook.

No glass needed. Original watercolors on paper are fragile and usually framed under glass. Casopra's watercolor-style pieces are printed on canvas, so they hang without glare. For an earlier chapter of painting outdoors, read Impressionism: How a Mocking Review Named a Movement.